The Ubu Plays

Alfred Jarry The Ubu Plays (1900)
1968 translation by Cyril Connolly & Simon Watson Taylor
It's hard to know where to start with Ubu. I started while taking drama 'O' level when I was seventeen or possibly eighteen, and it made a huge impression on me. It seems fair to say that Ubu made a huge impression on twentieth century culture in general, and if anything can be credited as the singularity from which modernism was born, it's probably Ubu. It's difficult to imagine there having been Dada or Surrealism without that formative kick up the arse provided when Firmin Gémier greeted his theatrical first night audience with a hearty cry of Merdre! back in 1896. Ubu Roi was hardly the first instance of artists thumbing noses at punters, but not even Rabelais did it with quite such riotous enthusiasm, using outrage almost as an end in itself.

Ubu Roi began life as a puppet theatre by which Jarry and his juvenile pals took the Victorian piss out of a hated school teacher, so any parallels one may happen to notice with Viz comic and the like are entirely pertinent. Jarry himself matured whilst ensuring that the scatological purity of his characters remained inviolate even as they moved from puppet theatre to the actual stage, by which point Ubu's focus had expanded to take the piss out of the entire Belle Époque and everything it held dear, not least its ruthless optimism. Pere Ubu achieves this by conquering Poland in the first play, then debasing himself in a peculiarly enthusiastic quest to become the lowliest of slaves in Ubu Enchaîné, the final tale. None of it really makes any fucking sense whatsoever, and that's sort of the point. I may have got more out of these plays had I been armed with a more thorough understanding of European history of the time - and I assume the treatment dished out to the Polish is supposed to be insulting for a reason - but the jokes still work so maybe it doesn't matter.

That being said, this book assembles the three Ubu plays, and although they're mostly entertaining, they work better on stage, as the author intended.